Stream

I'm thinking that the WordPress admin should display menus (functionality) based on what a theme or plugin supports. For instance, we shouldn't assume that all themes should support links, comments, widgets, etc. or even posts for that matter. Some themes/users might only need "pages" which means that most of the admin menus could and maybe should be hidden in that case. We have to manually add "theme support" within theme functions for features like "post thumbnails", so why isn't that the case for everything else?﻿

+Jason Schuller I could see this being extremely useful for themes. It'd be a lot of work to implement something like this in core though. It'd require more than just removing admin menus as well. For example, assume a theme wanted to remove support for pages. Core would need to disable all functionality related to pages, including admin pages, nav menu items, and the pages widget.

There are also some things that a theme shouldn't have this type of control over. You mentioned "comments" above, so I'll use that as an example. Whether comments are supported is defined by the post type. For example, the "post" post type supports comments. Any theme that supports posts should support all post features, which would include comments. If a theme didn't want to support comments for posts, then it really shouldn't be supporting posts at all.﻿

I’m a digital creative professional living and working in Seattle Washington. For the most part you will find me designing & developing projects for WordPress such as Press75.com, ThemeGarden.com and SimpleThe.me which is coming soon.